The Whiteness Standard
Whiteness hides in plain sight and recedes into our blindspots. Without effort, we can’t see or touch it. Attempts to measure or document it, are rejected as invalid, denied, obfuscated and gaslighted. This is further complicated because in our current (hopefully death throes-stage) version of whiteness the standard has been made aggressively unclear, intentionally unmoored from truth, science, and objectivity in order to manufacture consensus through the intentional propagation of crowdsourced propaganda and fiction.
Living inside the standard of whiteness, people in general, and white people in particular, see the world through white supremacy glasses, manufactured out of nonsense. We’ve worn them so long, we think that’s the way the world is. Whiteness is the filter we live our lives through, and for the most part (even if we know better, or should know better) we live our day-to-day lives as if it doesn’t exist.
The As-Is Architecture of Racism
One of the main functions of the technology of racism is to allow people to identify, visually, (and almost instantaneously) people that are protected and valued as fully human by the culture we live in by the standard of “whiteness.”
Conversely, and by contrast, the technology of Racism also allows a person to identify visually, (and for all practical purposes, instantaneously) NON-white people, who are NOT (or not fully) protected and valued by the culture we live in by the standard of whiteness. Or to put it more bluntly, to identify people who can be mistreated by white (or whiter) people with some degree of impunity: killed, enslaved, deported, imprisoned, brutalized, silenced, domesticated, raped, overcharged, overworked, or simply marginalized.
The whiteness we swim in
The system of racism and white supremacy hides itself in plain sight from white people. White people, in my experience (including myself) have a hard time holding the system of racism in our minds. It’s slippery. We distract ourselves from it. We cover it up. We freak out. Everything else intrudes as more important or urgent when we try and bring our attention to it. When we do catch a glimpse of it, the system of racism seems to large, too complex, too entrenched and too scary to think about. White people, we can observe, find it harder to get woke than Black and Brown people, and even harder to stay awake even if when they have an antiracist epiphany.
Sunset Racism
In 2009, Beth Colman published a landmark essay entitled Race as Technology in which she wrote:
“I ask the reader to consider race as technology. This proposition moves race away from the biological and genetic systems that have historically dominated its definition toward questions of technological agency.”
Its my intention to consider this question, less about race and more about racism. I’m asking the reader to consider racism (and the standard of white supremacy) as technology. I’m asking the white readers in particular to consider how this technology has been constituted and perpetrated by white people, and how we ongoingly participate in and perpetuate the technology from generation-to-generation.
Acknowledging Black women for the ideas on Sunset Racism
The blog, as currently written, is perpetrating racist harm on the people with whom I would most like to work, and whose work I am most interested in supporting, boosting and amplifying.
Here is the plan to address it and make amends.
Agilian antiracism self audit
A colleague of mine recently posted a Fast Company article about the failure of big tech to turn promises and monetary investments to fight Anti-Black racism into meaningful changes at their companies. Unsurprisingly, the numbers are not real good. In fact, as we all knew they would be, the numbers are terrible.
Doing Antiracism (Pt 1: Show up and don’t bail)
I’ve tried rushing into antiracism work to “help” but what I’ve learned is that it doesn’t actually work. … at all. But, if we’re not rushing, how do we address the urgent reality of our role at the root of the technology of racism?
We know we have to do something, but doesn’t it seem like everything we do just makes things worse?
That’s a good place to start.
Everything we do and say seems to make things worse, but doing nothing makes us complicit in the technology of racism and the standard of white supremacy.
The technology of racism is designed to take advantage of the groups of white folks who do nothing while hiding our own complicity from ourselves. So how do we break that cycle? How do we get into action, as white people, without perpetrating more harm in the world? How do we interrupt our complicity in whiteness and do our part to sunset racism?
Wherein I stan Ibram X. Kendi …
Over the last 20 years, I’ve often remarked that when the world gets serious about ending racism, there will be movements and institutions conducting rigorous (funded) inquiries into what needs to be done to end it. Taking the problem on, head on (as opposed obliquely, or from the sidelines) has always seemed to be conspicuously missing, until very recently, and thanks in large part to Dr. Kendi. It’s not that folks haven’t tried, but Ibram X. Kendi is the first person I’ve seen step up, and propose whole cloth to create what I’ve always felt was missing: a national multi-disciplinary antiracist community and movement, with funding, discipline, and data.…And then to go on to create, authentic platforms that have the potential to shift the conversation.
He has now started not one, but two, centers for antiracist research and policy: one at American University and another one at Boston University.
I stan both of them.
A welcome letter to white antiracists
White people don’t have a culture of helping each other deal with one another’s racism. We pretend it doesn’t exist. We collude with each other to avoid the topic. We gaslight and distract each other. It’s got to stop. We’ve got to stop. I’ve got to stop.
I could use some help with this, so welcome!